5.0 out of 5 based on 2 reviews. – Customer review on 15/02/2010

Tim Flannery is an excellent deliverer of bad news! The environmental message is loud and clear, yet Flannery offers topics of discussion that have the potential for change, if we, the readers so choose. I found this book really impacted the way I choose to live and the way i perceive my and my childrens future. An excellent timely book by Flannery yet again.

5.0 out of 5 based on 2 reviews. – Customer review on 29/10/2007

Acclaimed Australian scientist and writer Tim Flannery’s previous books The Future Eaters and The Eternal Frontier documented the pre-historical impact of humans on Australasia and North America respectively. In The Weather Makers he turns his attention to climate change, or more specifically human-induced climate change, which could well be the most pervasive, global and irreversible environmental crisis we humans have yet faced.
A serious oil spill like that which occurred in Valdez, Alaska in 1989, is disastrous, but localised. Unlike such events, climate change can affect an otherwise pristine wilderness, far from the cities which caused the problem.
‘For the last 10,000 years Earth’s thermostat has been set to an average surface temperature of around 14°C,’ Flannery writes. He explains that through burning fossil fuels over the last 200 years or so, humans have been responsible for a significant increase in levels of carbon-dioxide (and other gases such as methane) in the atmosphere. Higher levels of these ‘greenhouse gases’ is thought to have increased the average surface temperature of the planet by 0.63°C, with the likelihood of further increases and potentially accelerating and widespread impacts.
Of course climate change isn’t new. Flannery documents an extinction event 55 million years ago, caused by a rapid increase in greenhouse gases. However, what concerns Flannery is the rate of present changes, and the inability for the Earth’s biota to adapt.
Some species can adapt to a warming trend. For example, researchers documented that 35 ‘non-migratory species of butterfly…have extended their range by as much as 240 kilometres, while at the same time becoming extinct in the south of their habitat as it has been made unsuitable to them.’ But other species – those which can’t move or adapt quickly enough such as many mountain plants – will face extinction. Coral reefs and high altitude rainforests are particularly vulnerable to temperature changes: massive coral dieback is already evident in places like Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Flannery rates their future as ‘bleak.’ Loss of the Golden Toad from Costa Rica’s Monteverde cloud forest in 1989 was the first documented extinction due to human induced climate change. Basically increased temperatures dried out the damp habitat necessary for the toad’s existence on the tropical mountain.
Even if you’re sceptical, The Weather Makers is a devastating read. There’s scary stuff in this book – like thermal expansion. You thought polar ice caps melting was bad for rising sea levels. Well, without any melting at all, sea levels will rise 0.5-2m over the next 500 years just because warmer water occupies more space than cold. That’s bad news for Bangladesh, where over 10 million people live within one metre of sea level, and virtually every coastal city on the planet.
Depression and guilt competed for first place when I read this book.
But Flannery is no defeatist. In his last chapters he documents simple and achievable ways for us all to reduce our carbon imprint. Even if the most dire of Flannery’s predictions do not result, there seems to me very little to lose if we follow his suggestions to de-carbonise our economy. More micro-scale, renewable energy sources, solar-powered water heating and use of fuel-efficient cars would be positive ways for consumers to not only help reduce our impacts but to save money over the long term.
You won’t wind a more coherent, lucid summary of the climate change situation in any other book.
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Shaun Barnett